A lot of people can't do more with a computer than type a Word document or make a "picture", so called, on Paint. Of course most people reading this instructable will know a bit more about Windows than that. But even people whose knowledge is limited to browsing the Web have digital secrets they would like to conceal from prying eyes (and chances are, the more you know about computers and related items, the more you will have to hide). This -ible is meant to give a few ideas to people who can really use computers about hoarding information, teach people who know the basics a few ways to hide sensitive data, and perhaps inspire the computer illiterate to learn something (though the last group will most likely never get a chance to read this page). You need:

> A Computer > A Little Bit of Your Time > A Little Patience: this is my first instructable.

This instructable is not meant for people who are so completely "computer illiterate" that they do not understand computer basics, such as how to navigate directories, save documents, etc. If you have trouble saving a Word document to your desktop instead of My Documents, I advise you to learn the simple things first (just opening My Computer and browsing folders is surprisingly informative) before continuing here.

You can easily change the file extension back to .txt to make it readable in notepad. Using software to hide text, pics, etc, inside a picture works very well. There are several programs out there that can do that. Hide a porn pic inside a background or other normal pic. Only you know which picture contains it.You and your friends can communicate privately by typing your text and hiding it in a picture, send the picture and they can decode it. Don't modify the picture in any way after you encode it with text, or the text will become unrecoverable.

Personally I use a separate partition. When not in use, I go into Disk Management, and remove the drive letter. The drive goes away until you reapply a drive letter to it in Disk Management. I am sure you can apply more security to this 'hidden' drive, but it serves my purposes ;)

Try to make a "Cache" with the .txt document instead of archive.That text can be seen when you open your picture with notepad.It will be situated at the end of the whole text in Notepad.And your picture can still be opened as a picture

I know that two of the three computers in my house have AVG 8 virus protection, which prevents the program from running, showing a message titled "Storage Bin Creator.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close...", followed by a "Threat detected; Heal, Move to Vault; Ignore" window. I had to uninstall AVG to compile the batch file. I compiled the .bat file because the safe icon looks better than the batch file icon, but there's no point if one can't run the program; I'll add the batch version as soon as I can.

You can find a fairly good batch compiler http://www.f2ko.de/English/b2e/download.php. I couldn't get this program to work until I disabled my virus protection; AVG immediately tagged any .exe it compiled as a virus, and promptly destroyed it.

Yes I know about TrueCrypt. Ironically, I discovered it literally five minutes after I published this instructable.

as a technician, I can say that in the course of diagnosing a computer, I would likely discover or delete any and all data stored in these manners... I would read any bat files I find, definitely check out any nonstandard folders, and open any "misbehaving" image files with a hex editor ... these are common virus techniques for basic obfuscation... I would not trust them for anything more than simple "security through obscurity" ... which is only useful if no one skilled wants your information.

First of all, nothing is ever, ever, completely secure. If you can access something, there are probably six ways to crack, trick, or manipulate it. These are ways you could hide things from nosy family members, coworkers, and/or friends, but yes, as you made clear, no one with expert PC knowledge and a couple of good programs would be fooled.

a hex editor is a program that allows you to view and change any file as straight hexadecimal numbers... most hex editors also show binary and ascii (or unicode) representations... they are pretty darn useful in reverse engineering or editing compiled programs or file formats that don't provide a spec... also useful for figuring out when a jpeg isn't a jpeg, or when programs' skin files are really renamed zip files or such things...

If the cops are looking at your computer, they'll hand it off to a computer forensics specialist who will run a program that scans every disk block, searching for incriminating content. It will even pick up deleted files - hiding things with odd file or directory names won't help. The only security is encryption - and even that is true only if you can ensure that non unencrypted copy is ever written to disk.

As I said above, these are methods of hiding things from your family and friends. They would never keep anything from a skilled technician. If you have reciepts for murder weapons or files you use on your underground Anti-Obama radio show and the cops are closing in on you, I advise you to A) Encrypt everything on your computer, or B) Place a large pile of thermite on top of your poor PC and cremate it.